How to fix "Route [login] not defined" in Laravel

When we use guest middleware to protect routes in Laravel (e.g. for a user's dashboard), the default behavior is to automatically redirect a user to a login page.

That makes sense, given the majority of the time we'd implement this flow anyway.

If you don't have a login route defined though, you'll see Internal Server Error: Route [login] not defined. under a RouteNotFoundException exception.

Here are two ways to solve it.

Define a login route¶

Quite simply, create a route with the name of login! Here's an example:

Route::get('/auth/login', [LoginController::class, 'index'])
    ->name('login');

Now a route exists with the login name, your users will be redirected here when they attempt to access a page while unauthenticated.

Change the redirection path¶

If you didn't want to name this route login, or have to change it for any other reason, you can change this in bootstrap/app.php.

Just call the redirectGuestsTo method under withMiddleware, passing in the path you'd like to redirect users to.

return Application::configure(basePath: dirname(__DIR__))
    //...
    ->withMiddleware(function (Middleware $middleware) {
        $middleware->redirectGuestsTo('/auth/login');
    })
    ->withExceptions(function (Exceptions $exceptions) {
        //
    })->create();

And that's it. If you get the Route [login] not defined error in Laravel, you now know why it occurs and how to fix it.